Beast Of The Heartland And Other Stories Part 9

But no matter whether or not they were responsible, the Captains were a big help. They asked our ancestors if they wanted to remember what had happened or if they wanted to forget; they had machines, they said, that could erase memory. Our ancestors apparently couldn't live with the idea of all that death behind them, maybe because it was too close to deal with easily, and so they chose to forget. And they also chose further to reject many of the old world's advantages, which is why we have rifles and horses and hydroponics and no more... except for our hobbies (like the man in the gold helmet with his bubble car) and the hospitals. The hospital in Edgeville was a long silver windowless building where we went to get injections and also where we talked to the Captains. We'd punch a black stud on a silver panel and their images would fade in on a screen. It was almost never the same Captain, but they looked a lot alike and they wouldn't say their names. Ask them, and they merely said, "I am the Captain of the Southern Watch." They have these lean pale faces and wet-looking purplish eyes, and they are every one skinny and nervous and not very tall. The apes and the tigers? My guess is that there were animals in the sleeping caves, too. Our ancestors could have had the Captains do away with them; but maybe it was decided that enemies were needed to keep us strong. I used to hate our ancestors for that, though I suppose I understood it. They wanted a challenging life, one that would make us hardy and self-sufficient, and they got that sure enough. Gazing out from the Edge into that rotten darkness at the end of the flats, you had the idea you were looking back into that gulf of time between now and the destruction of the old world, and you'd get sick inside with the feelings that arose. That alone was almost too much to bear.

And on top of that the Bad Men burned our houses and stole our women. The apes defiled our children, and the tigers haunted us with their beauty... Could be that was the worst thing of all.

How did this world happen?

That's the whole of what I used to know about human history, and even now I don't know a whole lot more. It wasn't enough to make a clear picture, but for seven hundred years it was all the knowing most of us wanted.

I woke one morning to the smell of snow in the air. Snow meant danger. Snow meant apes and maybe tigers. The apes used the snow for cover to infiltrate the town, and sometimes it was all we could do to beat them off. I rolled over. Kiri was still asleep, her black hair fanned out over the pillow.Moonlight streamed through the window beside her, erasing the worry lines from her brow, the faint crow's-feet from around her eyes, and she looked eighteen again. Visible on her bared shoulder was the tattoo of a raven, the mark of a duelist. Her features were sharp, but so finely made their sharpness didn't lessen her beauty: like a hawk become a woman.

I was tempted to wake her, to love her. But if it was going to be a big snow, soon she'd be up in the high pa.s.ses, sniping at the apes filtering down, and she'd be needing all the sleep she could get. So I eased out of bed and pulled on my flannel s.h.i.+rt and denims, my leather jacket, and I tiptoed into the front room. The door to Bradley's room was open, his bed empty, but I didn't worry much. Here in Edgeville we don't baby our kids. We let them run and learn the world their own way. What little worry I did feel was over the fact that Bradley had lately been running with Clay Fornoff. There wasn't much doubt in anybody's mind that Clay would wind up a Bad Man, and I just hoped Bradley would have better sense than to follow him the whole route.

I cracked the front door, took a lungful of chill air and stepped out. Our house was at the back of the canyon, and the moonlight was so strong that I could see the shapes of separate s.h.i.+ngles on the hundreds of roofs packed together on the slope below. I could see the ruts in the dirt streets brimful of shadow, the fleeting shapes of dogs, blazes of moonlight reflected from a thousand windows, and at the center of it all, the silver rectangle of the hospital. Leafless trees stood sentinel on the corners, and darkness looked to be welling through the mouth of the canyon from the flats. If I strained my eyes, I thought, I might see eight thousand souls s.h.i.+ning in their little frame shacks.

I walked at a brisk pace down through the town. The shadows were sharp, dead black, and the stars glittered like points of ice. My boots made husking noises on the frozen dirt, and my breath steamed, turning into ice chips on my beard. From the sty in back of Fornoff's store I could hear the m.u.f.fled grunt of some pig having a dream.

Fornoff's was a lantern-lit barnlike place, with sacks of meal and garden tools stored up in the rafters, the walls ranged by shelves stocked with every kind of foodstuff, most of it dried or preserved. Brooms, bolts of cloth, small tools, and just about everything else were stacked in corners or heaped in bins, and in the back was a cold box where Fornoff kept his meat. A group of men and women were sitting on nail kegs around the pot-bellied stove, drinking coffee and talking in low voices; they glanced up and gave a wave when I entered. Dust adrift in the orange light glowed like pollen. The fat black stove snapped and crackled. I wrangled up another keg and joined them.

"Where's Kiri at?" asked Marvin Blank, a tall, lean man with a horsy face that struck a bargain between ugly and distinctive; he had a sticking plaster on his chin to cover a shaving nick.

"Sleepin'," I told him, and he said that was fine, he'd pick her a mount and fetch her when it came time.

The others went back to their planning. They were Cane Reynolds, Dingy Grossman, Martha Alardyce, Hart Menckyn, and Fornoff. All in their early to mid-thirties, except for Fornoff, who was beer-bellied and vast and wrinkled, with a bushy gray beard bibbing his chest. Then Callie Dressier came in from the back with a tray of hot rolls. Callie was about twenty-five, twenty-six, with a feline cleverness to her features. She had a deep tan, blackberry eyes, chestnut hair to her shoulders, and a nice figure.

You could see her nipples poking up her wool s.h.i.+rt, and her denims couldn't have been any tighter. She was a widow, just moved to town from Windbroken, and was helping out at the store. According to Fornoff's wife, the reason she'd moved was to kick up her heels. Windbroken is fairly straitlaced compared to Edgeville. Among the population of Windbroken we had the deserved reputation of not being too concerned over who was sleeping with whom... maybe because having to deal with the apes and the tigers gave us a less hidebound perspective on the importance of fidelity. Anyway, I was made both pleased and nervous by Callie's presence. Kiri didn't mind if I got it wet away from home once in a while, but I knew how she'd react if I ever got involved with anyone, and Callie was a temptation in that regard: She had in her both wildness and innocence, a mixture that has always troubled my heart. And so when old Fornoff announced that he was a.s.signing me and Callie to guard the front of the store, I was of two minds about it. Not that the a.s.signment didn't make sense. What with Callie being new, me not beingmuch with a rifle, and the store being hard to get at, it was probably the best place for us. Callie smiled coyly and contrived to nudge my shoulder with her breast as she handed me a roll.

I'd been intending to go back and wake Kiri myself, but the snow began falling sooner than I'd expected. Marvin Blank heaved up from his keg, said he was going to fetch her, and stumped out. The others followed suit, and so it was that at first light, with snow whirling around us, I found myself sitting hip-to-hip with Callie in the recessed doorway, blankets over our knees and rifles at the ready. The sky grayed, the snow came in big flakes like bits of ragged, dirty wool, and the wind sent it spinning in every direction, howling, shaping mournful words from the eaves and gutters. All I could see of the houses across the street were intimations of walls and dark roofpeaks. It was going to be a bad one, and I didn't try to avoid Callie when she nestled close, wanting all the creature comforts I could get.

We talked a little that first hour, mostly just things such as "You got enough blanket?" and "Want some more coffee?" Every so often we heard gunfire over the wind. Then, just when I was starting to think that nothing much was going to happen, I heard gla.s.s breaking from the side of the store. I came to my feet and told Callie to stay put.

"I'm comin' with you," she said, wide-eyed.

"No," I said. "Someone's got to watch the front. Stay here. I'll be back in a minute."

Out in the wind, my beard and eyebrows iced up at once. Visibility wasn't more than a few feet. I kept flat against the wall until I reached the corner, then jumped out, leveling my gun. Nothing but whirling snow met my eye. I eased along the wall, my heart pumping. Suddenly the wind spun the flakes in a kind of eddy, clearing an avenue of sight, and I spotted the ape. He was standing about a dozen feet away beside a broken window, his fur almost the same dirty white color as the snow, and he was carrying a bone club. He was a scrawny specimen, old, his fur worn down to the nub in patches, and the black mask of his face as wrinkled as a prune. Yet in the center of his face were set two young-looking blue eyes. It's hard to think of blue eyes being savage, but these were. They blinked rapidly, seeming to semaph.o.r.e rage and shock and madness, and their force stunned me for a split second. Then he came at me, swinging the club, and I fired. The bullet reddened his chest and blew him backward into a drift. I went over to him, keeping the rifle trained. He lay spread-eagled, looking up at the toiling sky. Blood was bubbling from his chest, miring his fur, and for a moment his eyes fixed on me. One hand clenched, his chest heaved. Then the eyes jellied and went dead. Snowflakes fell down to cover them. Watching them whiten, I felt a touch of regret. Not for him personally, you understand, just the sort of generalized, winnowing sadness you feel when you see death happen.

I walked back to the front of the store, calling as I went to Callie so she wouldn't think me an ape and shoot. "What was it?" she said as I settled next to her.

"Ape," I said. "An old one. He probably wanted to die, that's why he was tryin' for the store. They know the odds are against them this deep into town."

"Why'd he do that?" she said, and from the depth of her perplexity, the innocence of her question, I realized that she was so young and vital, it could never be made clear to her how apes and people will just up and grow weary of the world.

"Beats me," I told her. "Just crazy, I guess."

While we kept watch, she told me some about Windbroken. I'd only visited the town twice and hadn't thought much of it. Prettier than our town, that's for sure. With nicer houses and picket fences and larger trees. But the people acted as if that prettiness made them superior: Seems they don't have quite enough danger in their lives to keep them real. Callie didn't strike me that way, however, and I figured that she had found her rightful place in Edgeville.

She cuddled closer to me, and before long she slipped a hand under the blanket and rested it on my thigh, moving her fingers a bit, enough to get my dingus twitching. I told her to stop it, and she grinned.

"What for?" she asked. "Don't you like it?"

"That ain't the point." I lifted her hand away. "I'm married."

"Oh, I heard 'bout how married you are from Miz Fornoff." She s.h.i.+fted away, acting huffy. "Says you 'bout as married as a tomcat." "That ol' woman don't know nothin'!"

"Don't tell me that! She ain't the only one talks 'bout you." Her grin came back, s.e.xy and mischievous. "Clare Alardyce, Martha's girl? You oughta hear what she says! And Laney Fellowes, and Andrea Simpkins -- she told me 'bout the time you and her went out on the flats and..."

"Well, so what?" I said angrily. "It's no business of yours what I do!"

"Not yet."

"Not ever!"

"Why?" She asked this with the stubborn rect.i.tude of a child denied a treat. "Don't ya think I'm pretty?"

I couldn't say she wasn't, so I got by with "You're all right."

"If I'm just all right," she said, pitching her voice husky, "how come you try to see down my s.h.i.+rt every time you come in the store?"

I shrugged and stared off into the snow. "Just 'cause a man takes a peek, don't mean he's gonna buy the goods."

"You don't have to peek," she said.

The odd tremor in her voice made me turn to her. She had opened her coat and was unb.u.t.toning her s.h.i.+rt, exposing the plump upper slopes of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s: They were as brown as the rest of her and looked full of juice. She slipped loose another b.u.t.ton, and I could see one of her nipples, erect, the dark areola pebbled from the cold. I swear to G.o.d, I think my mouth started to water. She had the s.h.i.+rt mostly unb.u.t.toned now, and she took my free hand and brought it over to cup one breast. I couldn't help giving it a squeeze, and when I did, she arched into the pressure, closed her eyes and let out a hiss of pleasure.

Next thing I knew, I was bending to her and putting my mouth where my hand had been, and she was saying my name over and over, saying it soft so I could just hear it above the wind and pus.h.i.+ng my head down into a sweet warmth that smelled of harsh soap and vanilla water. And then she stiffened, froze right up, and was pus.h.i.+ng me away, whispering my name with a different kind of urgency. "What's the matter?" I asked, and she nodded her head toward the street, her lips parted, eyes bugged. I looked around and forgot all about Callie Dressier's b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Standing in the middle of the street was a tiger... and not just an ordinary tiger, if any of them can be said to be ordinary. He appeared to be more than twice the length of a man, and his head would have come at least to my shoulder. His fur was pure white, and his stripes were vaguely drawn the way some lines are in a delicate charcoal sketch. In the thick eddying snow he kept vanis.h.i.+ng and reappearing as would a dream creature or the image of a beast surfacing in a magic mirror. But he was no dream. The wind brought his heavy scent to me, and for the time he stood there, I lived in terror that the wind would s.h.i.+ft, that he would twitch his head toward us, burn me with those yellow eyes like sad crystals.

I had seen tigers prowling the slopes of the mountains at a distance, but never had I been so close to one, and it seemed that the vast weight of his life was diminis.h.i.+ng mine, that if he were to stand there long enough I would be crushed and transformed into some distillate of being. I had no thought for my gun, for Callie, and barely any thought for my own safety. All my thoughts were as insubstantial and flighty as the flakes whirling about his ma.s.sive head. He remained motionless for several seconds, testing the wind. His tail lashed, he made a small thunder in his throat, and then he sprang off along the street, disappearing into a tornado of snow that spun up from one of the drifts.

My chest ached, and I realized I had stopped breathing. I continued staring at the spot where the tiger had been. I turned to Callie, my mouth open. She lifted her eyes to mine, and a scratchy sound came from her throat. "I..." she said, and gave her head a shake.

"I know," I said. "G.o.d almighty d.a.m.n!"

Her face seemed to have been made even more beautiful by the apparition of tiger, as if the keenness of the sight had carved away the last of her baby fat, hollowing her cheeks, bringing out the sensitivity and soulfulness of the woman she would become. In that moment she looked to have captured something of the tiger's beauty, and maybe she had, maybe we both had, because she was staring at me as intently as I at her, as if she were seeing a new element in my face. I don't remember wanting to kiss her, I just did.The kiss lasted a long, long time. Like the tiger, it was not ordinary. It was a kind of admission, that kiss, an ultimate acknowledgement, and it was far more of a threat to Kiri and me than had been my fumbling with Callie's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It was an event that would be very hard to pull back from. We stood most of the remainder of the watch in silence, and we didn't get cozy again. We talked stiffly of inconsequential matters and were overly solicitous of one another's comfort. Both of us knew that what might have been a fling had gotten out of hand.

We had a tiger between us, now.

It had been bad up in the pa.s.ses, Kiri said. Charlie Hatton had been bitten in the neck, Mick Rattiger's skull had been crushed. Four men dead altogether. She stripped off her clothes and stood by the bedroom window, staring out at the moonstruck snow, her tawny skin drenched in whiteness.

Duelling scars on her stomach and arms. Lean and small-breasted, with long fluid muscles running from thigh to b.u.t.tock, and wings of black hair pulled back from her face: she posed a polar opposite to Callie's almost teenage beauty, her b.u.t.terfat b.r.e.a.s.t.s and berry mouth. She slipped beneath the covers, lay on her back, and took my hand. "How was it with you?" she asked.

I wanted to tell her about the tiger, but I didn't have the words yet, the words with which to tell her, anyway. My incapacity had only a little to do with Callie; I wanted to tell Kiri in a way that would open her to her own beauty. She'd never been a happy woman; too much of her was bound up by the disciplines of a duelist, by the bleakness of her youth in the northern ruins. She expected death, she believed in the lessons of pain, and she lived by a harsh code that I could never fully understand. I think she looked upon Brad and me as an aberration on her part, a sign that she had grown soft.

"Shot an ape," I said. "That's 'bout it."

She made a dry, amused noise and closed her eyes.

"I saw Bradley," I said. "He did fine, but I think he's off with Clay again tonight."

"He'll be all right."

She turned on her side to face me and caressed my cheek, a sign that she wanted to make love.

Directness was at odds with her nature: she lived by signs, hints, intimations. I kissed her mouth, the tiny crow tattoo on her shoulder. Pressing against me, her body felt supple, sinuous, all her muscles tensed as if for battle. There's always been a mean edge to our lovemaking, and that night was no exception. She seemed to be fighting me as I entered her, and she clawed my back so fiercely, I had to pin her wrists above her head, and when she cried out at the end, it sounded like a cry of victory, a celebration of triumph over her body's resistance to pleasure.

She went to sleep almost immediately afterward, and I sat on the edge of the bed, writing at the night table by the light of the moon. I was trying to write some words for Kiri, talking not about the tiger, but about how it had been that night with her. I had, you see, come to the realization of how much I loved her, how much I wanted to split open her hard sh.e.l.l and make her bloom at least for a season. Whatever I felt for Callie, I decided, was nothing by comparison, no matter if it was real.

But thinking all this made me restless and unhappy, and no words would come. So I dressed, grabbed a rifle and went for a walk, going knee-deep through the snowcrust, plowing ahead, having no real destination in mind. The town was quiet, but there were maybe a dozen fires flickering atop the canyon walls, and from those fires came the howling of apes mourning their dead. They'd be coming back with the next storm. The rooftops were mantled with snow; snow ledged the windows and marbled the boughs of the leafless trees, and the sound of my breath seemed harsh and unnatural in all that white stillness. I turned a corner and came in sight of the hospital, its silver metal walls flas.h.i.+ng and rippling with the moonlight. Seeing it, I realized that therein lay the only soul to whom I could speak my heart, the onlyone who was bound to listen and who would be sure to feel the current in my words. I walked to the door, put my hand flat against an inset silver rectangle, and after a second the door slid open with a hiss. I stepped into the anteroom. Soft light began to s.h.i.+ne from the walls, and a whispery voice asked if I needed treatment.

"Just a little conversation," I said.

The room was about fifteen by fifteen, and a large screen occupied most of the rear wall, fronted by three chairs of silver metal and some sort of foam. I plopped into one and punched the black b.u.t.ton. The screen brightened, dissolving to a shot of a solitary Captain. A woman. It's difficult to tell sometimes what s.e.x they are, because they all wear the same purple robes, almost the exact dark shade as their eyes, and their hair is uniformly close-cropped, but I knew this one for a woman, because when the picture had come into focus, she had been turned a bit sideways and I could see that her robe was pushed out a tad in front. Her skin was the color of the winter moon, and her cheeks were so hollowed that she looked toothless (yet she was pretty in an exotic way), and her eyes were too large for her face, a face that registered a gloomy, withdrawn quality during the entire time we talked.

"What's your name?" I asked; I always hoped one of them would just say to h.e.l.l with it and come clean.

"I am the Captain of the Southern Watch." Her voice was so soft as to be toneless.

I studied her a moment, thinking where to begin, and for some reason I decided to tell her about the tiger. "Listen," I said. "I want your promise that you're not goin' to go off and hurt yourself after I'm done."

She appeared reluctant but said, "You have my word."

You had to get this out of them before you told them anything fraught with emotion, or else they were liable to kill themselves; at least that was what I'd heard all my life. Their guilt over what happened to the world was to blame... Or so I thought at the time. But sometimes I would think that we were to them like the tigers were to us: beautiful strong lives that wounded them by merely being.

"Ever see a tiger?" I asked.

"Pictures of them," she said.

"Naw, I mean up close... so close you could smell it."

The idea seemed to trouble her: She blinked, her mouth thinned and she shook her head.

"I saw one that close this morning," I said. "Twenty, twenty-five feet away."

I went on to tell her of its heart-stopping beauty, its power, how I couldn't breathe on seeing it; I told her what had happened as a result between me and Callie. I could see my words were hurting her -- her bony fingers curled into fists, and her face grew strained -- but I couldn't stop. I wanted to hurt her, to make her feel as diminutive and worthless as the tiger had made me feel. I knew this wasn't fair. No matter if the Captains were responsible for the way things were, they weren't responsible for tigers; I was sure that either tigers or something like them must always have existed to help whoever was around to keep things in perspective.

By the time I finished, she was trembling, leaning away from me, as if my words had a physical value that was beating her back. She glanced from one side to the other, then -- apparently finding no help for her condition -- she turned back to me. "Is that all?" she said.

"Why do you talk to us?" I asked after a pause. "You obviously don't enjoy it."

"Enjoy?" The concept seemed to perplex her. "You are our lives."

"How can that be? We don't know your names, we never see you in the flesh."

"Do the important things of your life all lie close at hand?"

I thought about it. "Yeah."

She shrugged. "Then in this we are different from you."

I tipped my head, trying to see her in a new light, to read the world behind that pale mask. "But you want us close at hand, don't you?"

"Why do you think that?"

"Just a theory of mine." She arched an eyebrow.

"Y'see," I said, "you got us livin' with a limited technology, but whenever somebody wants to know somethin' new, a hobby, you let 'em investigate whatever it is... 'less it's somethin' too big. I figure you're lettin' us work our way to you."

Her eyes narrowed, but she said nothing.

"I've talked to a whole buncha you people in my time, and I get the idea you're ashamed of what you are, that you don't want us to see it... 'least not 'til we're strong enough to swallow whatever it is you're hidin'."

"Suppose that is the truth," she said. "How would you feel about us?"

"Probably not much different from now."

"And how is that?"

"Tell you the truth. I don't feel much 'bout you one way or the other. You're just faces and voices is all, and you don't have any real mystery to you like there is to stuff like G.o.d. You're like distant cousins who never come to visit, and who n.o.body misses at family reunions."

The hint of a smile lifted the corner of her mouth. I had the idea my answer had pleased her, though for no reason I could fathom.

"Well," I said, standing, picking up my rifle. "It's been fun."

"Goodbye, Robert Hillyard," she said.

That irritated me, her knowing my name and the reverse not being true. "Why the h.e.l.l won't you tell us your names?" I asked her.

She almost smiled again. "And you claim we have no mystery," she said.

Days, I worked in the hydroponic shed, a long, low building of caulked boards and plastic foam two streets east of the hospital. The shed and its contents were my hobby, and I liked breathing its rich air, mixing chemicals, watering, strolling along the aisles and watching the green shoots that had pushed up. I would hum, make up songs, and forget about everything else. Nights -- at least for the next couple of weeks -- I spent with Kiri. She had a duel coming up, and she was working herself up into that fierce calm in which she did her best fighting. It wasn't to be a duel to the death -- she had stopped fighting those when Brad came along -- but you could get hurt badly enough in a first-blood duel, and she was deadly serious. Kiri was one of the best there was. It had been years since she'd lost, but now, in her thirties, she had to work harder than ever to keep her edge. Sometimes there was just no being around her during her preparation. She would snap and snarl and dare you to say Boo. On several occasions I thought about dropping over to Fornoff's and seeing how Callie was doing; but I managed to resist the impulse. Kiri needed me, and I knew that pretty soon she would have to give up dueling, and then she'd need me even more to help her get through that time. So whenever it became necessary for her to have some solitude, I would take a rifle and climb up to the north wall of the canyon and see if I could pick off an ape or two. The north wall was higher than the south, where the apes tended to congregate, and was cut off from the ape encampments by a deep cut that we had mined with explosives and otherwise b.o.o.by-trapped. Though it was a clear shot, you couldn't see the apes very well unless they started dancing around their fires; even then, the range was so extreme, you had to be lucky to score a hit. Funny thing was, they didn't seem to mind when you did; they just kept dancing.